Free Sylvia's Farm by Sylvia Jorrin Page B

belly wool, and weighed fifty percent more than last year. Considering that I kept back five to use for hand spinning, that is quite good.
    Well, it would seem the Emperor really needed his dinner, because the afternoon’s shearing simply became a monologue about sheep from the expert’s mouth. I listened and smiled, and listened, and continued to pen sheep for him until he was finished. “I sheared 750 sheep in three days before coming here,” he said. It would seem to be by way of apology. “See you next year,” said the Emperor of Shearing. I laughed. My daughter said I should have served dinner at eleven in the morning rather than one-thirty in the afternoon. However, this lady of the manor never invited the Emperor of Shearers to set foot on this farm again.

SAMANTHA
    A CAR SCREECHED to a sudden stop on Elk Creek Road a couple of days ago, late afternoon. The familiar sound of a country tragedy. It is the sound of fear. The sound of terror, in fact. My son rushed out of the house. He saw a car stopped in the middle of the road. A man got out. My younger dog, Samantha, came racing toward the house from the roadside, ran to Joachim for a brief moment to be petted, only then to desperately circle the house and disappear into my farm office. The man drove off without a word.
    I had left for work leaving Joachim with the two dogs. Joachim called me later in the evening at my job. “I can’t find Samantha,” he said, “anywhere.” He had searched the house, most of its cellars, the farm office, the wood room, and finally, with a neighbor’s flashlight, along the roadside ditches, he said, after retelling the story of the accident. The accident that we were not certain had happened. Was Samantha hit, grazed, or missed? Border Collies are the smartest dogs of all, I’ve been told, and yet they are quite often roadside casualties in the country. The instinct to herd, to work, is built in, bred, some say for hundreds of years, and others, thousands. There is a school of thought that the Norwegians brought elk-hunting dogs with them to England and crossed them with some herding dogs from France, and there is another school of thought that links them with the wolf. Above all, Border Collies need to work. It is ingrained in them to flock something, anything. Even cars moving quickly along the road. Samantha had been taught, with her mother Steele, to drop on theverge of the road upon hearing an approaching vehicle. I realized early on that since Border Collies are driven to
do something
when a moving object approaches or recedes from them, to train them to drop on the wayside grass was a possible replacement action to chasing cars. Steele can be trusted, but Samantha is still very young, and I’m not certain what she will do if I’m not with her. The shepherd acts as a command dog.
    Samantha is an eager and loving puppy. The first sound of my step in the driveway coming home will bring her running to me. If I so much as mention her name to someone with whom I’m talking on the phone, Samantha will react to me from the back porch. She reads my mind and comes to me when I’ve just thought her name, before I can even call “Sammie, Sam, Sam.” She is always there. Until the other evening.
    My boss was most understanding about the phone calls interrupting us all evening. “Did you look here, did you look there, the other where …” I asked, bringing up every imaginable other either Joachim or I could think of, but no Samantha.
    The next morning I came home directly from work and walked beside all of the roadside drainage ditches. I looked in the big metal culvert under the road, and then, with an enticing piece of cooked chicken held in my hand, went into the wood room where sometimes Samantha sleeps far underneath a set of stairs. The room was silent except for the beat of my heart. “Samantha,” I called. I looked partway under the